The Japan Syndrome

Rush Limbaugh on the Old Media Meltdown:

You know, the longer you live and the more disasters you see, the more you realize, ladies and gentlemen, that almost, and it’s very close, an almost equally important part of the story is the media. It really is. The media’s getting really ticked off. Why aren’t the Japanese panicking? Why aren’t there any looters? There are actually stories about this. Of course it is interesting that the Japanese are not looting, and in fact evil Japanese businessmen are lowering prices on commodities and in some cases even giving things away to aggrieved citizens.

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I actually heard a CNN reporter ask, hopefully, “Is there widespread looting going on?” These people are looking for disaster. They want disaster upon disaster. They want the nuclear meltdown. They want the Japanese syndrome, if you will. They want this stuff. A friend of mine, ladies and gentlemen, is in the business of the film arts, otherwise movies. And he tells me that he once had a movie director who used to say all the time, “Do not be afraid because fear kills.” And I have to wonder if you look at the coverage here if this isn’t what he had in mind. This is just the wanton spreading of fear. When in fact most of these nuclear reactors in Japan are behaving as designed. They are containing. There’s not this widespread disaster.

Our climatologist here, Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama Huntsville sent me some statistics, the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl was a horrible design run by idiots in the old Soviet Union. Why are you frowning, Snerdley, is something wrong in there today? You’re watching the coverage of the tsunami and the earthquake? It is depressing. That’s the point. It’s depressing as it is. We don’t need this made worse. I’ve got a bunch of See, I Told You So’s, the media making it about Obama, the media saying it’s due to global warming. Within two hours the media was saying it’s gonna happen here. The media was saying, “Well, that’s the end of the nuclear power industry in America.” No, it shouldn’t be, but guess who owns the nuclear power industry in this country? Good old General Electric, good old Jeff Immelt, good old buddy of Obama.

At LAX this morning, as I was waiting to fly back to San Jose from a weekend visit to Los Angeles, the American Airlines departure area had CNN on so loud that my ears felt like they would bleed — and of course, the network was in full Katrina-style doomsday mode.

As Tatler impresario Bryan Preston noted back in late 2006 at Hot Air, the legacy media’s false Katrina narratives and Apocalypse Now-style coverage helped to drive the Democrats’ Congressional victory in November of 2006, setting the stage for their control over all branches of the Federal government in 2009 and 2010. Is their tone covering the catastrophe in Japan simply how they’d cover any large natural disaster or is there some other agenda driving the coverage?